I haven't seen it and I probably won't

My older daughter went with a friend to see the new X-Men movie yesterday. She said she liked it but it was hard to follow because she kept expecting it to be more like the book; she'd rank it second among the three, thinks the first was the best and the second the worst.

Personally, I don't like movies based on comics. Seriously, I don't. I think it's good that they make them, because I think it's probably good for comics on the whole, but I don't particularly want to see them.

And it's not because I'm so anal-retentive that I can't stand seeing different interpretations and spend the whole time saying "that's not how it happened," as if a fictional comic world has a greater reality than a fictional movie world--I've never read Spider-Man or the Hulk (apart from their appearances in some other books), have no particular sense of where they should fit, and I didn't want to see those movies either.

One thing, I think, is that the movies are necessarily removed from any continuity with the rest of the Marvel universe. Spider-Man in a movie isn't going to run into the Human Torch. Any movie superhero is the only one. (Unless the movie is about a team, such as the X-Men or Fantastic Four movies. Then they are the only group. Villains they have, other heroes they don't.) For some reason, I don't like that--I prefer it when there's a whole implied superhuman community out there.

Another part of it is that the superhero thing seems to require a greater suspension of disbelief when I see it on the big screen than it does when I read it in a book, regardless of special effects (which are indeed pretty cool these days). Possibly it's that I don't feel the same connection to comics when they're taken out of the familiar--that I don't relate to comics on screen as I do to comics in books because comic books have such a strong "comfort reading" factor. But I just don't get the same feeling about heroes in movies as I do about heroes in books.

This all makes perfect sense to me, so it's annoying as hell when a new comic-based movie is coming out and people who know I like comics assume that I'm excited about it, or that I plan to see it, and generally I don't know a thing about it apart from possibly who's playing what part. I do generally see the movies eventually, because generally at some point my husband will bring them home on DVD. And I'll admit that the Fantastic Four movie was pretty good. (And I'll also say that when he brought Daredevil home I left the room to do something else. :))